


Dave Strider Character Analysis

by Chocolatepants



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Analysis, Essays, Psychology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:42:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24176059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chocolatepants/pseuds/Chocolatepants
Summary: My term paper for my psych personality class was to do a personality analysis on any fictional character and apply at least two different personality theories to explain why their personality "is what it is" and I choose to do mine on Dave bc I'm a fuking Homestuck.I've never written anything for fanfics before, but I'm still tossing this bad boy into the internet for funsies
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Dave Strider Character Analysis

**Author's Note:**

> Ngl to ya pal, this is a pretty boring essay and I had to skim a lot of details for the sake of making it easier for my professor to understand bc I doubt he's read homestuck. So forgive the boringness, but enjoy the psychological breakdown
> 
> (also sorry bout the blocks of text, but I had to write it like an essay)

Homestuck was a popular webcomic created by Andrew Hussie and hundreds of other collaborators. It ran from April 13th 2007 to April 13th 2016 and its story unfolded over 8,000 pages. The plot of Homestuck is very convoluted and difficult to explain, but essentially it tells the story of four kids who played a video game that ended up destroying the world, and then have to complete the game to create their own universe. One of these four original kids is Dave Strider. Dave is a 13 year old boy who lives in Houston Texas with his older brother, who is also his only guardian. At the start of the webcomic, Dave comes across as arrogant and annoying, despite his constant vocal claims that he only acts that way to maintain his “cool” image. Yet as the reader gets to know Dave more it becomes increasingly obvious that although Dave talks a big game, he does not really have any faith in his own abilities and his pursuit of being “cool” has a warped understanding of the word. Over the course of the comic, Dave is forced to face many of his own flaws as a person, as well as comes to terms with the fact that he had an abusive and traumatizing childhood that he struggles to put behind him. Dave’s character arc can be better understood through some of the Neo-Freudian theories of psychoanalysis. These theories offer a different perspective to better understand Dave as a character at different points in his life, as well as to understand what drives his changing personality.

Sigmund Freud is a household name in psychology, but it is really the ideas of the Neo-Freudians that are mostly used today. Alred Adler, for example, though Freud was too focused on sex. Adler focused more on people’s social interest, or their desire to relate positively with others. Another big part of Adler’s focus was on inferiority, particularly organ inferiority which states that people are motivated to attain superiority over others by compensating for a perceived weakness they had in their childhood. Adler believed that this desire to eliminate inferiority could develop into a particular inferiority of masculine protest, which is what drives some adults to be powerful due to their perceived masculine weakness as a child. This idea also translates into a person’s style of life, which is a person’s behavioral pattern which is rooted in compensation for childhood weaknesses. All of these ideas fit under Freud’s original idea of the unconscious mind, which drives a person’s behaviors and desires even if they are not fully aware of it. Another contributor of the unconscious mind theory was Carl Jung. Jung believed that everyone had a persona, or a social mask that one wears in public, that covered up a person’s inner consciousness and their “shadow” (which was essentially the unconscious mind). However, Jung also focused on how people thought of the world consciously with his idea of archetypes. Archetypes are roles that supposedly every human can view the world through, roles like the Hero, the Sage, and the Devil are all examples of how people might view these symbolic ideas. These archetypes are also present in the media and are played by characters that can drive the plot forward. Other Neo-Freudians like Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott introduced the idea of object relations. In this theory, objects are emotionally important people, and the theory believes that people can only relate others based on their version of them in their mind, and it isn't always accurate. Due to this difficulty in understanding people, relationships have some satisfaction and frustration, a mix between love and hate, a distinction between the object and the person, and the mind is aware of and disturbed by all of these contradictory feelings. Klein expanded on the contradiction of objects with the idea of splitting, where a person will split a loved object into good and bad parts, parts that are idealized and ignored. Winnicott took a different approach and focused on the niffle, a comfort object that helps a person transition. Niffles are common for children to help them transition from a fantasy world of childhood into reality, and in the process of the transition they would grow from being dependent (on their families and on the niffle) to being more independent. Adults use niffles too, usually in the form of something sentimental that connects them to an important person or event. All of these theories and ideas bring us back to Dave Strider and how they apply to him. 

Well, to start Homestuck actually makes frequent references to Freud and his works. This usually occurs in the form of Rose, Dave’s sister who lived separately, pestering him about his emotional state and physical wellbeing. For most of the characters Dave interacts with he puts up a “cool guy” persona which often is seen to drive people away. Though with Rose, it only makes her question what is going on behind the mask of his persona. One aspect that she constantly questions Dave on is his relationship with his older brother and guardian, who is only ever referred to as Bro. Bro had raised Dave in a harsh environment. Bro had raised Dave to be a fighter, he had filled their apartment with weapons and traps and would constantly attack him at random moments. Although this environment was clearly a dangerous place to raise a child in, Dave had always accepted it because he thought it just made him cool like his brother. Bro in Dave’s eyes was the ultimate idea of male strength and coolness and Dave strive constantly to be more like him. This is where the organ inferiority comes in, because throughout the early parts of the comic, Dave is constantly pushing himself to be stronger and act as the protector his Bro had tried to make him. Dave overcompensates for his weakness against his brother by trying to be stronger than all the friends he has around him. Dave felt he would never be as cool as his brother, so he clings so strongly to his air of aloofness when he’s around others. The persona he built was meant to be everything that his brother had trained him to be, but his unconscious was in turmoil over it. Another aspect of Jung’s theory also plays an important role, particularly the archetypes and how they apply to Homestuck. One feature of the comic is that each person is assigned a class within the game, and these classes play closely to the archetypes Jung describes. Dave is given the class of a knight, a role very similar to the hero archetype. However, Dave rejects the notion of being a hero and in one of his first steps towards moving away from his inferiority problems, he admits that he doesn’t think he could ever actually be the hero that Bro had always trained him to be. Dave faces this dilemma as he is told to pull a legendary sword from a stone, a clear reference to the great hero King Arthur, but after Dave fails to pull the sword out he takes a different approach. Dave explains to one of his friends that his brother was a hero, not him and instead of trying to pull the sword out of the stone, Dave instead brings down a huge rock on the sword which snaps it in half. The sword was freed from the stone, but it was the broken weapon of a hero. Yet Dave still picks it up and carries it with him, and from that point on the broken sword becomes something he uses most often in battle. It becomes a symbol of Dave’s failure to meet Bro’s standards, but his continuation to fight and defend despite his faults. 

Several pages after Dave frees the broken sword, he discovers that his brother is dead. Bro had been fighting one of the big antagonists of the comic and had been stabbed through the heart by his own sword. As Dave discovers this he feels strangely apathetic towards Bro’s death. He explains that he doesn’t think he actually loved Bro at all, and yet he is still sad at his death. These contradictory feelings and confusion are a result of the object relationship Dave had with Bro. Dave had split the idea of his brother into an idealized version of a hero and all-around cool guy, but in doing so he was ignoring the fact that his guardian had hurt him over and over again all by convincing himself it was fine that this was happening. Dave realizes that his relationship with Bro was something he had always felt conflicted about, but had just never addressed it. After he explains this, Dave is confronted with just how much of his life he had spent trying to be just like Bro. One thing to note is that Dave is always shown wearing a pair of sunglasses in the comic and Bro is too. It is revealed that they used to have identical pairs of sunglasses until a few years prior when Dave was given his own by his best friend John. After that Dave never takes the glasses off and it becomes clear that they act as a niffle for him. The sunglasses hold sentimental value because they came from a dear friend and acted as a piece of independence, something that would be different than his Bro but still respect the “cool guy” persona he carried. After Bro’s death, Dave finds himself faced with his own death. In his final moments before he’s afraid that he’ll be blown up by a giant bomb, he takes off his sunglasses and looks impending death in the eye. However, in the game they play there is a mechanic that can bring players back to life, and Dave returns. Upon his return, Dave continues to wear his sunglasses religiously, but he finally starts to open up about how uncomfortable he was with his childhood and how much pain he had endured. The niffle of his sunglasses may still be a part of him, but he’s finally started the transition towards accepting that his childhood was not quite as “cool” as he imagined. Up to this point in the comic, Dave’s relationship with his brother had almost become a source of comedy in the comic, because of the aloofness that Dave displayed about it and the truly absurd conditions he was living in. However, after he begins to transition as his own independent person, separate from the “hero” his brother had tried to make him, the comedy behind his situation comes to light and his past is treated as an actual traumatic event, rather than something Dave had played for jokes. This marks a big change in the webcomic’s structure, but it doesn’t suddenly flip Dave’s character around to have him address his grief all at once. Instead, it is something he sits with for the rest of the comic (and even into the epilogues). Dave is a funny character and he continues to crack jokes and act as comedic relief, but it isn’t all that he is relegated to. His personality remains true to him, but with appropriate reactions to the harsh situations, he’s faced with. There is no coin-drop realization moment where Dave suddenly understands where he stands with his emotions, but rather a slow progression of understanding that the readers only catch glimpses of through his interactions with his friends. Understanding all of this is what lays the foundation for Dave’s growth as a person in a realistic way. It may not be an ending to his character arc, but it is an explanation for where he started.

There is so much more of Dave’s story to tell, but these ideas are the basis for which he builds his character arc off of. All the Neo-Freudians’ theories help contribute to better understanding Dave Strider as a character. However, Adler’s theories of inferiority and Klein and Winnicott's object relations definitely offer some of the best explanation for why Dave’s personality had developed the way it did. Dave faces his organ inferiority of his strength, heroics, and “cool factor” at the start of the comic, though he is not aware of them. This causes him to put on his cool kid persona and drives his arrogant and cocky nature. The origin for this inferiority is explained through the object relationship he has with his brother. From how Dave understands Bro as an object, he is idealized and someone Dave tries so hard to be like. Yet at the same time he finds himself faced with dissatisfaction at their relationship, especially when he finally has other families to compare it to (when he finally starts talking about his Bro to his other friends and they express concern). This leaves Dave feeling disturbed by his contradictory feelings to simultaneously mourn his brother’s death and the relief he feels now that he is finally gone. This contradiction is what finally breaks down the split versions of his Bro and what starts him on the path towards progress. Both of these theories explain how Dave had been shaped by his past, but give the readers hope that there is still more to come. People don’t just stop changing, they are always in a state of progression. With this knowledge and understanding of Dave’s past and his personality it finally looks like Dave can start working towards that progress.


End file.
